Consumers desire hand dish-washing products that deliver both long lasting grease cleaning and long lasting suds. Additionally, more and more consumers are looking for products that contain a greater proportion of ingredients that are derived from natural, renewable sources. These include liquid hand dishwashing detergent compositions containing higher levels of surfactants derived from renewable sources, and having less surfactants derived from crude oil. However, since natural surfactants have little or no branching, such compositions produce lower levels of suds. Even worse, such detergent compositions have low suds-mileage. That is, the suds endurance is less than what most consumers would like.
In addition, high levels of linear anionic surfactants, such as those derived from renewable natural sources, but also linear synthetic surfactants, lead to worse stability of the resultant composition at low temperature.
Therefore, a need remains for a liquid hand dishwashing detergent composition providing good cleaning and long lasting suds, while having excellent low temperature stability, which utilizes anionic surfactants having little or no branching.
It has been surprisingly found that small amounts of a branched, alkoxylated nonionic surfactant, in combination with ethoxylated anionic surfactants having little or no branching, provide excellent grease cleaning and long-lasting suds. More surprisingly, by using the branched alkoxylated nonionic surfactant, in combination with anionic surfactant having a minimum degree of ethoxylation and little or no branching, a liquid hand dishwashing detergent composition can be formulated having excellent low temperature stability.
WO 9533025, U.S. Pat. No. 5,968,888, US 2007/0123447 A1, US 2005/0170990 A1, WO 2006/041740 A1, and U.S. Pat. No. 6,008,181 disclose liquid hand dishwashing detergent compositions comprising branched surfactants.